Edward Albee Quotes

If you spend a hundred bucks, or more, to go to the theatre, something should happen to you. Maybe somebody should be asking you some questions about your values, or about the way you think about things. Maybe you should come out of the theatre, something having happened to you. Maybe you should be changing, or thinking about changing. But if you just go there, and the only thing you worry about is where you left the damn car, then you wasted a hundred bucks.

The health of a nation, a society, can be determined by the art it demands. We have insisted of television and our movies that they not have anything to do with anything, that they be our never-never land; and if we demand this same function of our live theatre, what will be left of the visual-auditory arts - save the dance (in which nobody talks) and music (to which nobody listens)?

Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.

All plays are social comment to one extent or another.

What happens in a play is determined to a certain extent by what I thought might be interesting to have happen before I invented the characters, before they started taking over what happened, because they are three-dimensional individuals, and I cannot tell them what to do. Once I give them their identity and their nature, they start writing the play.

The Theatre of the Absurd, in the sense that it is truly the contemporary theatre, facing as it does man's condition as it is, is the Realistic theatre of our time; and that the supposed Realistic theatre - the term used here to mean most of what is done on Broadway - in the sense that it panders to the public need for self-congratulation and reassurance and presents a false picture of ourselves to ourselves is ... really and truly The Theatre of the Absurd.

I do not invent characters. There they are. That's who they are. That's their nature. They talk and they behave the way they want to behave. I don't have a character behaving one way, then a point comes in the play where the person has to either stay or leave. If I had it plotted that the person leaves, then the person leaves. If that's what the person wants to do. I let the person do what the person wants or has to do at the time of the event.

I'm infinitely more involved in the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in everyday life.

Art should never try to be popular.

Audiences and, to a large extent, critics who want less from theater than it is possible for it to give. If everybody's encouraged to want less, you'll end up with less.

Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process
it is, after all, black magic.

Death is release, if you've lived all right.

I stopped acting when I was about nineteen, twenty, when I got thrown out of college. I did act for about ten years. I don't know. I suspect I'm still a reasonably good actor, but I don't really know that I want to get on the stage again ... and having to say all those boring words by me over and over again ... I don't know if I want to do that. Also, I like a certain amount of freedom of movement, and if you're acting, you're stuck in one place for a long time. Having said that, I will probably be onstage next fall.

Maybe it's a little more pertinent now since the whole concept of evolution is being questioned by the know-nothing Republican right. Yes, maybe the play's a little more pertinent now.

All serious art is being destroyed by commerce. Most people don't want art to be disturbing. They want it to be escapist. I don't think art should be escapist. That's a waste of time.

Good writers define reality
Bad ones merely restate it.

The government is far more interested in taking, in regulated taking, than in promoting spontaneous generosity.

I think we should all live on the precipe of life, as fully and as dangerously as possible. Everyone should make the assumption that they're going through life only once. Tomorrow we die. Why not take chances, extend yourself? How awful it is when a person comes to the end of life full of regret.

One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.

HONEY: (Apologetically, holding up her brandy bottle) I peel labels.
GEORGE: We all peel labels, sweetie; and when you get through the skin, all three layers, through the muscle, slosh aside the organs (An aside to NICK) them which is still sloshable
(Back to HONEY) and get down to bone ... you know what you do then?
HONEY: (Terribly interested) No!
GEORGE: When you get down to bone, you haven't got all the way, yet. There's something inside the bone ... the marrow ... and that's what you gotta get at. (A strange smile at MARTHA)

There's no limit to you, is there?

I said I was impressed, Martha. I'm beside myself with jealousy. What do you want me to do, throw up?

You're in a straight line, buddy-boy, and it doesn't lead anywhere ... except maybe the grave.

The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-wheeling, bold, iconoclastic, and often wildly, wildly funny. If you will approach it with childlike innocence
putting your standard responses aside, for they do not apply
if you will approach it on its own terms, I think you will be in for a liberating surprise. I think you may no longer be content with plays that you can't remember halfway down the block.

I have been both overpraised and underpraised. I assume by the time I finish writing
and I plan to go on writing until I'm 90 or gaga
it will all equal itself out.

You ... you've been here quite a long time, haven't you?
What? Oh ... yes. Ever since I married What's-her-name. Uh, Martha. Even before that. Forever. Dashed hopes, and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested. How do you like that for a declension, young man?

I have learned that neither kindness or cruelty by themselves, or independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves.

What I wanted to get at is the value difference between pornographic playing cards when you're a kid, and pornographic playing cards when you're older. It's that when you're a kid you use the cards as a substitute for a real experience, and when you're older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.

Knowing it--knowing it's true is one thing, but believing what you know... well, there's the tough part.

Well, when you write about people of a certain age ... we are in a postsexual situation. If I write about younger people then I write sexually, because their drive is sexual. It depends upon the circumstances.

Awww, 'tis the refuge we take when the unreality of the world weighs too heavy on our tiny heads.

I swear, if you existed I'd divorce you.

When people can't abide things as they are, when they can't abide the present, they do one of two things ... either they ... either they turn to a contemplation of the past ... or they set about to ... alter the future. And when you want to change something ... YOU BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

There are lots of young vital playwrights who are experimenting, and these are the plays that people who are interested in the theatre should see. They should go off Broadway. They should go to the cafe theatres and see the experiments that are being made.

Everything becomes ... too late, finally. You know it's going on ... up on the hill; you can see the dust, and hear the cries, and the steel ... but you wait; and time happens. When you do go, sword, shield ... finally ... there's nothing there ... save rust; bones; and the wind.

Any definition which limits us is deplorable.

You find very few critics who approach their job with a combination of information and enthusiasm and humility that makes for a good critic. But there is nothing wrong with critics as long as people don't pay any attention to them. I mean, nobody wants to put them out of a job and a good critic is not necessarily a dead critic. It's just that people take what a critic says as a fact rather than an opinion, and you have to know whether the opinion of the critic is informed or uninformed, intelligent of stupid
but most people don't take the trouble.

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.

If you want a commercial success - it's the confusion of commerce with art. A successful play is not considered to be the best written. It is the one that sells the most tickets. Those standards are destructive [to theatre].

It is a lazy public which promotes a slothful and irresponsible theater.

Anything you put in a play
any speech
has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along.

Who tolerates, which is intolerable; who is kind, which is cruel; who understands, which is beyond comprehension ...

Very few people who met my adoptive mother in the last 20 years of her life could abide her, while many people who have seen my play find her fascinating. Heavens, what have I done?!

Addiction is a repeated temporary...stilling. I am concerned with peace...not mere relief.

Progress is a set of assumptions.

To write a play one must be born a playwright. Otherwise, you're starting at a huge disadvantage.

Martha: Fix the kids a drink, George. What would you like to drink, kid– kid.
Nick: Honey? what would you like?
Honey: Ohhhh, I don't know, dear, a little brandy maybe. "Never mix, never worry!"
George: Brandy? Just brandy? Simple, simple…
[George turns to Nick.]
George: What about you, em… em… em…
Nick: Bourbon on the rocks, if you don't mind.
George: Mind? I don't mind. I don't think I mind. Martha? Rubbing alcohol for you?
Martha: Sure! "Never mix, never worry!

That's what happens in plays, yes? The shit hits the fan.
Edward Albee

The world is a zoo

Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve.

You want to dance with me, angel tits?

When you get old, you can't talk to people because people snap at you ... That's why you become deaf, so you won't be able to hear people talking to you that way.

There may be lots of questions that anybody - an actor or a director or anybody - can ask about a character in a play of mine that are not answered in the play, but if it's a question that I don't think is relevant, I don't bother about it. There's no reason to ask it.

But the landlady is a fat, ugly, mean, stupid, unwashed, misanthropic, cheap, drunken bag of garbage. And you may have noticed that I very seldom use profanity, so I can't describe her as well as I might.

The most profound indication of social malignancy ... no sense of humor. None of the monoliths could take a joke.

If you have no wounds, how can you know if you're alive?

You don't see anything, do you? You see everything but the goddamn mind; you see all the little specs and crap, but you don't see what goes on, do you?

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Musical beds is the faculty sport around here.

I write to find out what I'm talking about.

That's the happiest moment. When it's all done. When we stop. When we can stop.

The only time I'll get good reviews is if I kill myself.

There is chaos behind the civility, of course.

I'm not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, I'm rather happy to say-it leaves me something to do.

I created myself, and I'll attack anybody I feel like.

When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions
that you have something to say, that you know how to say it, that its worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride.

Stevie: (Not listening) That you can do these two things ... and not understand how it ... SHATTERS THE GLASS!!?? How it cannot be dealt with-how stop and forgiveness have nothing to do with it? and how I am destroyed? How you are? How I cannot admit it though I know it!? How I cannot deny it because I cannot admit it!? Cannot admit it, because it is outside of denying!?

The greatest problem with Irish Wolfhounds, though, is that they don't live very long: their great hearts give out. A good deal of this is genetic, of course, but I think it is in part that they worry so for us, care so much.

To all of you who have made my being alive so wonderful, so exciting and so full, my thanks and all my love.

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.

A playwright has a responsibility in his society not to aid it, or comfort it, but to comment and criticize it.

In a democracy you cannot stop public access to that art that will most misinform the people. You cannot stop people from being misinformed. But what you can do is to educate the people to the point that they will throw the rascals out.

Alright ... what do you want me to say? Do you want me to say it's funny, so you can contradict me and say it's sad? Or do you want me to say it's sad so you can turn around and say no, it's funny. You can play that damn little game any way you want to, you know!

And the west, encumbered by crippling alliances, and hardened with a morality too rigid to accommodate itself to the swing of events, must ... eventually ... fall.

I'm not responsible for the commercialization. The people who produce the plays are responsible for it.

When a critic sets himself up as an arbiter of morality, a judge of the matter and not the manner of a work, he is no longer a critic; he is a censor.

I dance like the wind.

Everybody wants to go see the big hit [at the theatre]. Not because it's any good. Because it's the big hit and everybody wants to be able to talk about the big hit.

If Attila the Hun were alive today, he'd be a drama critic.

I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.

Every monster was a man first.

It's sad to know you've gone through it all, or most of it, without ... that the one body you'v wrapped your arms around, the only skin you've ever known, is your own ... and that's it's dry, and not warm.

Being different is ... interesting; there's nothing implicitly inferior or superior about it. Great difference, of course, produces natural caution; and if the differences are too extreme ... well, then, reality tends to fade away.

A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

The notion that women are less aesthetically profound and innovative than men
just not very important, if you know what I mean
doubtless spreads back to our beginnings as upright animals: the males hunted and killed for the family while the females stayed home in the cave and tended the strange little creatures they were giving birth to.

Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end.